Stop Kicking My Rear!

I´m in a window seat on a flight to Florida. I´m barely functional because of world-class, Olympic Gold Medal jet lag from an Australia trip two days before. I can barely think, I´m so tired. All I want from life at this moment is to sleep. All I want is to close my eyes and wake up in Florida. I feel like stale, leftover toast.

Behind me, however, there´s a toddler practicing Flamenco dance steps on the back of my seat. There´s also a lot of toddler noise coming from the same general area. I can deal with the noise, I have some good headphones. But the kicking, man, there´s no way to sleep through that. So I look back between the seats and see it´s a little girl behind me, maybe three years old. Her dad, in the middle seat, catches my eye, and I see him motion her feet down with his arm.

This works for approximately the attention span of a toddler, and a few seconds later she´s dancing all over my rear end again. I wait awhile, look between the seats once more, a little longer this time. I can see the dad has a little boy on his lap, and the boy is the source of the noise. The little boy is really letting loose, too. A lot of incomprehensible moaning and gutteral noise. At times he´s flat-out wailing. It´s like he just got this new voice box and is testing it for volume, tone, range, and vowel sounds. Dad sees me again, I see his arm move toward his daughter. There´s another ten second pause and the kicking resumes. I need to sleep so badly, but this kicking is relentless.

My patience is short. I´m functioning at one level above zombie. I start thinking, “If they´re too young to travel, why don´t you leave them home? I paid for my ticket; I deserve to fly in relative peace. Could we tie her shoelaces to the armrest? Does anybody here have some St. Joseph´s Ambien For Children?”

Finally, I unhook my seat belt, rise, and turn so I can actually speak to the father. I look back over the seat at him, he looks up at me. I notice he´s a nice looking young man, maybe late 20s. I start to tell him I can´t sleep with all this kicking. But before I can finish the sentence, he mouths the words, “I´m deaf.”

My mouth closes. My words drift away. I nod at him that I understand. I look at his wife in the aisle seat. She smiles and nods, “We´re deaf.” I look back at the little boy on his lap, because he´s obviously older than his sister. Why would he be the one on the lap and not the little girl? Then it´s obvious. The little boy is mentally handicapped. That´s why he can´t control his voice. And guess what: his parents can´t even hear it.

All this flashes through my mind in about five seconds.

So I nod, and sit back down. I start thinking about this family. Two deaf parents with two toddlers, one of whom is mentally challenged. I think about all the people I know with young kids, and how much energy it takes to raise them. I think about the people I know who have handicapped kids, kids with autism or cyctic fibrosis. I think about how hard that is, how the parents never get any rest.

And then I try to imagine how much harder it would be if they were deaf.

Then I think about this little girl. This little blonde girl kicking my seat. She has two deaf parents, and an older brother who´s mentally handicapped.

Her life is going to be challenging, to say the least.

Suddenly all these kicks don´t seem like such a big deal. Now they start to feel like little cries for attention. I decide to think of them as love taps.

I can sleep later.

© 2008 Greg Tamblyn